Category Archives: Thailand

Posted onMarch 15, 2013|Comments Off on Is Asia’s Foreign Exchange NDF Market The Next Domino To Fall?

That’s the basic question I take away from this recent article from the FT’s Jeremy Grant, which uses a wrongful dismissal lawsuit ex-UBS traders are bringing against their former employer as a gateway to discussing price transparency in the Asian non-deliverable FX market.

The important bit doesn’t come until the second half of the article:

“Quite how this “shadow” fixing system has emerged in Singapore, alongside the official rates set by southeast Asian central banks, is a bit of a mystery. Bankers say it was because traders didn’t historically trust the onshore fixing. It is easy to forget the depth of anti-market feeling in Malaysia during the Asian crisis.”

Posted onJanuary 16, 2013|Comments Off on Chart of the Day: The top 10 stock exchanges of 2012

This is actually going to be a few charts, because the first chart as you can see looks ridiculous:

It should go without saying that there’s something very wrong with this picture, and indeed Miguel Octavio sums it up better than anyone I know here, but the long and short of it is that runaway inflation and an ass-headed capital controls regime has wildly overstated the “returns” in Venezuela. So let’s get rid of Venezuela and look at how the rest of these stack up against the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Here’s what we get:

I’ve just spent way too much time playing with Ernst & Young’s interactive spider graph thingy that allows you to compare their 25 “rapid-growth” markets across a range of macroeconomic indicators. According to E&Y, these 25 countries possess the most promising “long-term potential to generate strong business opportunities.”

So since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s how all 25 of these economies will change from 2011 to 2016 from the meta-macro view, compared against each other:

If you can withstand all the coulds, shoulds, mights, caveats and other hedges, McKinsey’s latest Indonesia analysis has some interesting nuggets in there. It’s all good primer material for anyone who wants to get up to speed on what’s happening there but the following excerpts I found the most interesting.

Exports generate only 35 percent of Indonesia’s GDP, with non-commodity exports accounting for 11 percent; the rest comes from domestic consumption. Indonesia’s total exports as a share of GDP are roughly half those of Malaysia in 1989 when the average income there was similar to Indonesia’s today. The share of non-commodity exports in Indonesia’s GDP is about one-third that of Thailand or Malaysia today…